Offices Held

Biography

Mackworth was a collection of apparent paradoxes: a Country Tory industrialist and financial ‘projector’; a godly-minded High Churchman; and a publicly pious and philanthropic swindler for whom not one among his contemporaries could find a kind word. His background was staunchly Parliamentarian. In the late 1640s and 1650s the Mackworths had been the pillars of the ‘Good Old Cause’ in Shropshire. His grandfather and namesake (d. 1654), a Republican, had served as governor of Shrewsbury, as member of the Council of State and as knight of the shire in the first Protectorate Parliament. After the Restoration his remains had been disinterred from Westminster Abbey and thrown into a common pit in the churchyard. Both Mackworth’s father and his uncle sat in the Protectorate Parliaments but do not seem to have played any part in elections after the Restoration. Mackworth himself, although he became a staunch Tory, did not entirely renounce the ways of thinking inculcated by what one may assume to have been a Puritan upbringing. This aspect of his character is most clearly visible in his diaries, with their emphasis on spiritual self-examination and their acceptance of the reality of Providential intervention in daily life. It also surfaces in a theological tract written in his maturity, in which the ‘necessary means’ of salvation are listed in order as ‘consideration, reading the Scripture, prayer, fasting, resolution, receiving the Sacrament’. At the same time he always stressed the ‘absolute necessity’ of ‘unity and uniformity in Church and state . . . to preserve the peace and welfare’ of governments.5

Mackworth had presumably adopted the creed of Tory loyalism as early as 1683, when, as ‘comptroller of the Middle Temple’, he was knighted by Charles II. Two years later he presented an address of warm congratulation on James II’s accession on behalf of the barristers and students of the Middle Temple (an incident which later would be raked up by Whig critics), and in February 1688 was appointed a deputy-lieutenant of Monmouthshire. Established by his father with an annuity of £80, he had by the time of his knighthood been able to make ‘a small purchase’ of land in Worcestershire, but although he later claimed to have acted ‘as a standing counsel’ for his mother-in-law ‘in twenty lawsuits’, there is no evidence that he made much of a career at the bar. This did not prevent him from proposing himself in December 1688, in a letter to the Duke of Ormond’s secretary, for the post of attorney or solicitor to the Prince and Princess of Orange, as ‘heir [sic] presumptive’ to the crown, a suggestion that was ignored and in any case soon became meaningless. What made his fortune was an outstanding match, to the heiress of Sir Herbert Evans of Neath, in west Glamorgan, whose estate was worth some £1,200 p.a. and rich in coal mines. This gave him the self-confidence to upbraid his father and others of his relations, who had in his opinion hitherto been ‘the greatest obstacle to my advancement’. While his county neighbour Lady Kemys (wife of Sir Charles, 3rd Bt.*) regarded Mackworth, in comparison with her own husband, as a model of marital fidelity, his own correspondence treats the union simply in material terms. At the time of the marriage his wife was still a minor. He saw her inheritance as a God-given opportunity, writing in his diary, ‘I found it was not sufficient to eschew evil but we must also do good, and that it was not convenient to hide my talent in a napkin’; and he entered upon the task of exploiting these new resources ‘purely out of a design to do good in the world, to my children, and to the poor’. His first published work, a pamphlet of 1694 on the Bank of England, showed that he was already familiar with public finance, at home and abroad, and with the West Indian plantations. It was a paean to trade, ‘England’s glory’, and to the Bank as the likely promoter of ‘a great improvement’ in trade, with several schemes to facilitate its operations, including a novel idea for a national network of bonded warehouses from which money could be advanced on the security of deposited goods. Mackworth was not yet, however, the master of the Evans estate and in a position to develop his own projects, for after Sir Herbert’s death his widow had remarried, and her second husband, a David Evans, took over the management of the property. To Mackworth, who all his life entertained conspiracy theories of one kind or another, Evans was ‘resolved to ruin me and my dear children’. His sudden death in 1696 was thus a Providential deliverance ‘from the very brink of ruin and destruction’. Invited down to Neath to take charge of Lady Evans’ affairs, Mackworth ‘was . . . transported with excess of joy, thought the world was my own, and all things were fallen into my power’.6

Mackworth’s keen and enterprising intelligence had already seen the potential of the Neath estate. His first aim there was to recover the collieries, which had fallen into decay, and soon the mines were yielding as much as £600 p.a. At the same time he was reviving the disused copper-smelting works at nearby Melincrythan, and looking for some means of bringing collieries and manufacture together. Lead and copper mines in various parts of south Wales were investigated, and in 1697 Mackworth’s eye fell upon the great lead and silver mines at Esgain Hir, Cardiganshire, formerly the property of Sir Carbery Pryse, 4th Bt.*, who in the early 1690s had unsuccessfully attempted to float a joint-stock company to exploit them. Mackworth was rapidly convinced of their enormous potential, linked to his collieries and smelting-works, and opened negotiations to purchase. His conception was for an industrial complex, with his own coal used for the smelting of lead and copper, the extraction of silver, and the manufacture of litharge and red lead as by-products, with shipping from his wharves at Neath to Bristol and Bridgwater. This innovative project required far more capital investment than Mackworth could muster. The solution was another joint-stock venture. He and his associates launched a publicity campaign to revive interest in the ‘Welsh Potosi’. He took chambers at Lincoln’s Inn for the sole purpose of providing an office from which printed prospectuses, with extravagant claims, were distributed. An ingenious lottery scheme meant that many more ‘adventurers’ subscribed than were able to acquire stock, and the company was established with even more capital than had originally been envisaged as necessary. Mackworth was obliged to forgo his own preference for making the venture a family affair, but his company, which received its royal charter in 1703, was still dominated by the Mackworths, with the Duke of Leeds (Sir Thomas Osborne†) a figurehead governor, Mackworth himself holding the real power as deputy-governor, and a board of directors packed with relations and cronies.7

Several directors and major investors, such as Lord Digby (William*) and Lord Weymouth (Thomas Thynne†), were acquainted with Mackworth through the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. As one of the founders and most active early members of the SPCK, he was delegated with others in 1700 to request the patronage of Lord Chancellor Somers (Sir John*), served as chairman of the society in 1702 and on its committee for the setting up of church libraries in Wales, and attended meetings of the society’s offshoot, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, of which he was also a founder-member. He was also busy locally in the society’s concerns, maintaining charity schools on his own lands, including one for the children of his workmen at Neath. In seeking investment for his company, Mackworth appealed to charitable sentiments. One pamphlet promised that a fortieth of the company’s profits would be set aside for the erection of a hospital and a workhouse. The outcome was the company’s ‘charity’, a fund which paid for a clergyman to preach to the workforce, and more generally gave assistance to the augmentation of poor vicarages, missions in the West Indies, the naval hospital at Greenwich, and so forth. Mackworth saw no incongruity in the juxtaposition of philanthropy and profit. He once composed a prayer for ‘grace to submit, and to mind, first the qualification for eternity, and then the settlement of my own family, and the Mine Adventurers’ Company, as well as the Neath manufacture’. Business dealings, however shady, were seen as consonant with pious duties, but hypocrisy was never too far away: his use of condemned criminals as indentured labour at Neath, though ostensibly a philanthropic gesture, in fact afforded him cheap labour and a muscular mob to defend his and the company’s property against over-vigorous opposition. And he admitted to himself that he had strayed from the straight path: ‘alas, by degrees I fell into anxious cares and troubles, vain thoughts and imagination, and my first intention was in the great measure forgot and blotted out, and I was filled with the creature and not the Creator.’8

Naturally, Mackworth’s ambitions soon encompassed a parliamentary seat. In June 1699 he was asking his mining manager to despatch ‘presents of coal’ to a ‘Mr Pugh’ and to Lord Lisburne (John Vaughan*) as part of a long-term strategy to build up his ‘interest’ in Cardiganshire. By the following April an opening seemed imminent, and Mackworth wrote a more urgent, and very revealing, letter:

Some persons tell me . . . there will be a want of a Member for your county, Mr Lewis Pryse* being under age; and that nothing would be so honourable for your friend, as to be elected for that county where the mines lie. My Lord Lisburne, Mr Lewis Pryse, and Mr Powell, together with Mr Lloyd . . . can certainly order what they please . . . this must be kept private, but in order to it you may be paying my compliments to my Lord Lisburne, that he may command what coal he pleases, at his own price; and that I do highly acknowledge his lordship’s favours, and should be glad to know how I might serve him, that if this mine be brought to bear, that you are sure I could prevail on this company to agree with his lordship for his advantage. You know how to offer coal likewise to Mr Powell at his own price, at 12s. a chaldron; and that you are sure I shall always be his friend on many occasions. You must also, from me, congratulate Mrs Jane Pryse’s marriage, and pass the same compliments there. And whenever you see a leading man there, you must prepare him to expect advantage, and among other things I pray make an interest to establish a fishery in that country, set up a woollen manufacture, maintain the poor, etc. These thoughts being well spread beforehand, will prepare the way better than if they did suspect there was any design in it.

These blunderbuss tactics, supplemented by the deployment of company connexions such as Leeds to press the ‘usefulness’ to the Mine Adventurers of Mackworth’s presence in the Commons, and the active assistance of company officials in his canvass, secured his return to the first 1701 Parliament, where he rapidly established himself as an active Member and featured as a frequent nominee to select committees. In addition to presenting a private bill (29 Mar.), Mackworth reported during this session from committees considering the papers relating to Captain Kidd (27 Mar.); the public debts (17 May); petitions relating to the Act of the previous session for creating a way from Chancery Lane to Lincoln’s Inn (27 May); and petitions concerning forfeited Irish estates (13 June). Several measures in which he was interested were likely to appeal to one of a ‘Country’ cast of mind, though it was somewhat ironic, given his own behaviour in Cardiganshire, that he should chair the committee of the whole of 3 May on the bill to prevent bribery at elections. He was also involved in the bill for the qualification of j.p.s, which he reported on 10 June and carried to the Lords three days later. His party allegiance was Tory from the first: he was listed in February as likely to support the Court in agreeing with the supply committee’s resolution to continue the ‘Great Mortgage’; was named on 1 Apr. to prepare the articles of impeachment against the Earl of Portland; was teller on 15 Apr., on the Tory side in the East Retford election case; and was later blacklisted among those who had allegedly opposed making preparations for war with France. His first recorded speech (though evidently not his maiden speech) occurred on 16 Apr. 1701, when he proposed an amendment to the address for the removal of the impeached lords from the King’s councils, ‘that we should assure the King of our readin[ess] to support the King and his government against all his enemies at home and abroad’. According to Sir Richard Cocks, 2nd Bt.*, ‘this was said to be to undeceive peop[le] abroad that though we had impeached the lords we would support the King and to let the world see that it was their faults and not any disrespect to the King’. Other speeches noted by the diarist were on 16 May, in support of retaining the article of impeachment against Lord Somers which accused the former lord chancellor of receiving exorbitant grants from the King; on 21 May, in a debate on the civil list; and on 4 June, when he seems to have parted company with fellow Tories in excusing some of the proceedings of the Upper House in the matter of the impeachments – ‘the Lords may send for a conference in a parliament[ar]y way as well as thi[s] House’. The session ended, however, with his election, in fourth place, to the abortive commission of accounts, and he spent the ensuing two months composing a Vindication of the Rights of the Commons of England, more specifically a justification of the Commons’ part in the impeachments controversy. Dedicated to the King, the Lords, and the Speaker of the Commons, this lauded the peculiar ‘excellency’ of the English constitution, which was defined as a ‘regulated or limited monarchy’ with the ‘absolute, supreme and legislative authority . . . lodged, not in one, but in three distinct persons or bodies [King, Lords and Commons], united by interest to the same common end, the public good’. The ‘three branches of the supreme authority’ also had ‘several particular powers lodged in them, as mutual securities, for the common safety, to assist each against the encroachments of the other’. Thus the Commons, ‘the representatives of the people’, possessed a power ‘of prosecuting and impeaching evil ministers’, necessary ‘to preserve the King and people from the secret designs of contriving and ambitious men’, and in this respect were ‘the great bulwark of the rights and liberties of the people of England’. A vigorously argued if unoriginal piece, it none the less produced an effect. Translations into Dutch and French were published in Holland, while at home Henry St. John II* considered that it had ‘done very considerable service in the city’ and would accomplish even more ‘in the country’: ‘it contains a great deal of plain truth, and exposes to the eyes of the people a just draft of our admirable constitution’, despite the fact that the ‘style and invention’ seemed to him ‘barren and dry’. The recurrence of several of these themes in Mackworth’s later writings – the unique excellence of England’s balanced constitution, the role of the Commons as defenders of English liberties, the supremacy of the ‘public’ interest – must count against any verdict that the Vindication was merely political hack-work. At the same time, it is clear that Mackworth was seeking to make his court to the new powers among the Tories. St. John referred to him as ‘our bantering friend’ and noted in the autumn of 1701 several unfulfilled promises by Mackworth to visit Lydiard Tregoze, while Mackworth was also writing to Robert Harley* in terms of the deepest flattery: ‘we all depend upon your conduct to lead us through an ocean of difficulties in the ensuing session. ’Tis our happiness to have such a general.’9

Mackworth’s many influential contacts did not secure him a seat at the second 1701 election, in which Lewis Pryse of Gogerddan, now of age, took his family’s accustomed place as knight of the shire for Cardigan, but at the very next election the following year Pryse stood down, presumably because of ill-health, and Mackworth was returned again. Among the committees to which he was nominated was that of 5 Jan. 1703, to draw up an address in support of any increase in forces thought necessary and to stop all correspondence with France and Spain, which he reported on 7 Jan. His nomination on 1 Feb. to the committee charged with preparing an address concerning Lord Ranelagh (Richard Jones*) and the public accounts, from which he reported two days later, implied a stance critical of government, and he showed his party colours in telling on 28 Jan. for Richard Hele* in the Plympton election. Elsewhere his legislative activity often involved local or even personal concerns: he presented on 21 Nov. 1702 a bill for repairing Aberystwyth harbour, and on 17 Nov. he and his cousin Sir Thomas Mackworth, 4th Bt.*, a long-term partner in his mining schemes, were given leave to introduce a bill to encourage mineral manufacture, and to regulate miners. One particular bill is worthy of note: on 3 and 7 Nov. 1702 Mackworth chaired committees of the whole considering ‘the most effectual ways for setting the poor on work’, and on 9 Nov. he was ordered to prepare a bill to reduce into one statute all the laws relating to the poor, the first of several such projects with which he came to be identified. Later in this session, when his own general bill foundered, he reported and carried to the Lords the Gloucester workhouse bill (19, 21 Jan. 1703). On 20 Dec. 1703, in the next session, he reintroduced his poor relief bill, and on 22 Feb. 1704 chaired the committee of the whole on this measure. He reported from this committee on 20 Mar., but again the bill was lost. He achieved his greatest prominence over the issue of occasional conformity, and ‘put out a small treatise’ in defence of the bill and in answer to Charles Davenant’s* Essay upon Peace at Home and War Abroad, which had set forth the ‘moderate’ side of the argument. Mackworth’s pamphlet, written ‘in a hurry’, was styled Peace at Home, its subtitle echoing his previous paper on the impeachments question, A Vindication of the Proceedings of . . . the House of Commons on the occasional conformity bill. As before, he revealed himself a banal theorist. ‘This pamphlet’, wrote one commentator, ‘contains little else besides the arguments used a year ago on the same subject, and these too delivered with little address and much warmth.’ Protesting his ‘tenderness’ for Dissenters, and for the maintenance of the Toleration Act, Mackworth repeated the staple argument that ‘unity and uniformity in Church and state’, and particularly to retain the administration of public affairs in the hands of persons who were of the same ‘persuasion’ in religion, was ‘absolutely necessary to preserve the peace and welfare of every government in the world’, against the danger of faction. The occasional conformity bill did not represent ‘persecution for conscience only’ but an essential safeguard for social stability. In a more aggressive mood, he reminded his readers of the Dissenting ‘collaborators’ under James II, and cited the contemporary threat to Christianity from heterodox theologians: were the Dissenters sure, he asked, that there were no ‘lurking Deists, no Socinian politicians behind the curtain’? It was about this time that Mackworth’s name appeared in a so-called ‘secret committee’ of High Tory politicians in the Commons, and perhaps it was his role in supporting the occasional conformity bill that brought him close to Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Bt.*, who is known to have assisted in the acquisition of the Mine Adventurers’ charter. His reputation as a High Churchman was further enhanced by the publication of two tracts, A Treatise Concerning the Divine Authority of the Scriptures . . . and A Discourse by Way of Dialogue . . . (which incorporated the ‘treatise’). Both were largely theological in content, and somewhat dull. None the less, they went through several editions. In the latter Mackworth put the case for episcopacy against Presbyterianism, though not vehemently, and he touched upon the question of resistance, enjoining obedience to higher powers except where God’s commands conflicted with man’s, a point he perhaps wisely did not develop. The investigations into the Scotch Plot also claimed his attention, and on 28 Feb. 1704 he reported from a subsequent committee to inspect the Lords’ Journals in connexion with the affair. The following month Lord Nottingham (Daniel Finch†) listed Mackworth as likely to support the Court’s position in the Scotch Plot proceedings. ‘Country’ preoccupations resurfaced in the bill he introduced on 3 Feb., to regulate parliamentary privilege in the cases of persons in public office, and even in his one reported speech of the session, on 24 Jan., on the Aylesbury case, despite the fact that this was in essence a party cause. Defending the Commons’ ‘sole right of judicature’ on franchise questions, he emphasized the importance of ‘freedom of election’: there should be ‘no terror, neither on the electors, nor on the officers’. And he defined the purpose of voting as ‘not for a private advantage . . . but for the general advantage of the kingdom’. In an echo of earlier praise, he noted, ‘this is an excellent constitution, and admirably well contrived for the public safety’. For the Lords to be able to ‘punish our officers and govern our elections’ would make the Commons ‘dependent’ and would upset the constitutional balance. His speech also included two more specific, and telling, points. He noted that ‘there are several sorts of rights and several sorts of laws in England, and there are several courts of justice for the administration of these laws’. A ‘parliamentary case’ required ‘a parliamentary remedy’. Secondly he distinguished between ‘an actual force or violence done by the officer’, for which he did allow a common law remedy to be sought, and ‘a bare omission in point of duty’ which would involve a decision on the right of electing and was actionable only via a petition to the Commons. The more general arguments were developed during the summer recess in a pamphlet whose construction and thrust were remarkably similar to the Vindication of 1701. Indeed, that earlier work was reissued in 1704, since it bore so closely on the issues raised by the Aylesbury case. Free Parliaments: Or, a Vindication of the Fundamental Right of the Commons of England in Parliament Assembled . . . declared ‘a free Parliament’ to be ‘the great bulwark of the liberties of England’, and ‘free elections’ to be a prerequisite of a ‘free Parliament’. The Lords’ intervention threatened to undermine the constitution in two ways: by upsetting the balance between the two Houses, and by introducing the concept of the vote as a species of property right instead of a ‘public’ privilege granted for the general good of the commonwealth. The success of the pamphlet may be gauged by the fact that it provoked a direct rejoinder, The Ancient and Fundamental Right of English Parliaments . . ., which fell into ad hominem attacks on Mackworth, recalling his appearance on the 1701 ‘blacklist’ and his defence of the occasional conformity bill, and advising him to ‘go off the stage with applause of all parties that contend for peace and quietness’.10

Mackworth was approaching the zenith of his political influence and parliamentary eminence. He was reputedly one of the moving spirits behind an unsuccessful High Tory conspiracy to oust Harley from the chair after his appointment as secretary of state. On 14 Nov., after the opening of the new session, he seconded the motion to reintroduce the occasional conformity bill, and, having been twice forecast as a probable supporter of the Tack, duly voted for it on 28 Nov. During this session his efforts to secure a general reform of the Poor Law came to a head in an acrimonious public debate. The previous winter, Mackworth and John Comyns* had produced a second bill to make some general provision for the unemployed poor, by setting up a national system of workhouses. The measure fell, but in the summer of 1704 the bill was reprinted and circulated, and, with the addition of clauses covering the education of poor children, which had the approval of the SPCK, was brought in again by Mackworth on 2 Nov. Over the succeeding months he chaired the committee of the whole on the bill, but although engrossed on 8 Feb. 1705 it failed in the Lords. Mackworth had to counter the detailed objections of political economists like Defoe, who savaged the bill both in the Review and in Giving Alms No Charity, where he argued that Mackworth’s workhouses would only undercut existing manufactures and therefore would in the long run increase rather than decrease the numbers of the destitute. On the other hand, there was a broad stream of support for the bill. Some High Anglicans shared with those of a pronouncedly Dissenting disposition a strong sense of the social obligation concomitant with property ownership, and Mackworth’s proposals brought to a climax a decade of pamphleteering and local initiatives, on the part of non-jurors and High Churchmen as well as Low Church Anglicans and Dissenters. One suggested reason for the defeat of the bill has been the pressure on time in the Upper House consequent upon the continued wrangling over the Aylesbury case. It is also possible that, despite the cross-party backing Mackworth’s bill enjoyed, his own personality alienated Whigs from it. A story ran that ‘Lord Sunderland [Charles, Lord Spencer*] rose up and spoke against it’ in the Lords, ‘and said it was not fit to be passed because Sir Humphrey Mackworth was the author of it, and accordingly their lordships rejected it’. Mackworth had maintained his high profile in party politics not only by his commitment to the campaign against occasional conformity but also by his continued participation in the debate over the men of Aylesbury, and he may have contributed two further pamphlets to the Commons’ cause. By now he could be described by Defoe as ‘the general pamphleteer of the [High Church] party’. In the Dyet of Poland he appeared as ‘the Dyet’s pamphleteer’, recognizable by his ‘florid’ but ‘empty’ oratory. One historian has hypothesized that Mackworth may have masterminded or co-ordinated Tory propaganda for the 1705 general election, and has attributed to him the Word of Advice to the Citizens of London . . ., which denounced ‘moderation’ in general as ‘a kind of stalking horse, now made use of by the enemies of the Church’, and various ‘Sneakers’ by name: Charles Davenant, Anthony Hammond*, (Sir) Simon Harcourt I*, Sir Charles Hedges*, and ‘the H[arle]ys’. His own candidature attempted to scale a peak of High Church ambition. Leaving Cardiganshire, where the difficulties of the Mine Adventurers’ Company may perhaps have weakened his interest, he accepted, against wiser advice, an invitation from Henry Sacheverell and other fellows of his old college to stand for Oxford University against Sir William Whitlock*, whose opposition to occasional conformity had been less staunch. Mackworth’s fellow Tackers, men like Ralph Freman II*, were tapped for whatever influence they might possess in the university; the Magdalen interest was active, distributing bundles of Mackworth’s tracts, and crates of wine; Whitlock was ridiculed in ballads and broadsheets; and Mackworth himself produced a new pamphlet on the eve of the election, in the form of an open letter to Sacheverell, his chief supporter. But there was a rallying of Tory forces behind the outgoing Member. Lords Nottingham and Rochester (Laurence Hyde†) put out a statement confirming their approval of Whitlock, and William Bromley II*, Whitlock’s colleague in the university representation, also dissociated himself from Mackworth’s challenge, with the result that Mackworth trailed in a poor third. Fortunately Sir Edward Seymour and Bishop Trelawny were able to provide him with a refuge at Totnes. An analysis of the new Parliament classed Mackworth as ‘True Church’, and, forgetting any personal animosity which might have arisen from the events at Oxford, he voted on 25 Oct. 1705 against the Court candidate for Speaker. He persisted with the poor relief bill, presenting this measure to the Commons on 14 Nov. Six days later he chaired the committee of the whole which discussed it: again it came to nothing. He acted as a teller on 1 Dec., on the Tory side in the Amersham election dispute, and on 4 Dec. made the first of several speeches reported in this session by an anonymous diarist (Grey Neville*), on this occasion in support of an address to invite over the Hanoverian heir presumptive. Four days later, in the ‘Church in Danger’ debate, he made a pointed intervention, questioning ‘that it should be criminal to say the Church [was] in danger w[he]n a Scotch army coming in and French army in K[ing] James [sic]’, reminding the House that the Duke of Marlborough had once voted for the occasional conformity bill, and remarking that there was ‘not wood enough to hang up [those] gent[lemen]’ who thought the Church in danger. On the 19th he helped defend Charles Caesar* from censure following Caesar’s innuendoes against Lord Treasurer Godolphin (Sidney†), and in January he contributed several speeches to the debates on the regency bill. On 10 Jan. he expressed his principal reservation about the bill (reiterated in a subsequent discussion on the 19th), that it gave too much power to regents, a ‘regal power’ in fact, which was ‘as ample as the successor’, making them ‘absolute kings’ and giving them an opportunity to ‘repeal the Act of Succession’. He was also opposed to the clause that rendered ‘preaching, teaching or advised speaking’ against the succession punishable by praemunire. His second tellership in this session occurred on 4 Mar. 1706, when he told against the bill to explain the 1699 Popery Act. About this time he achieved an unlooked-for political prominence as a result of allegations over the authorship of the Memorial of the Church of England, the most notorious of the Tory pamphlets of the previous summer, and one containing virulent personal abuse of Marlborough and Godolphin. The printer, David Edwards, claimed that the manuscript from which he had worked was in the hand of Mackworth’s servant (and the Mine Adventurers’ Company secretary) William Shiers; that he had an order in Shiers’s hand for the delivery of the printed copies; and that he had seen a bookseller bearing proofs to Mackworth’s house on Snow Hill. He provided an account of an interview with Mackworth in which his intermediary also accused Mackworth of being the author of two anonymous pamphlets of 1705 on the Aylesbury case, Pro Aris et Focis . . . and A Defence of the Liberty and Property . . . At this Mackworth was ‘struck with a sort of amazement’. ‘I am very well satisfied’, concluded Edwards, ‘that Mr Pooley [Henry*] and Sir Humphrey are the authors of it.’ Lord Cowper (William*) was convinced of the truth of Edwards’ testimony, and of the identification of Shiers’s hand. The pamphlet itself, though more scurrilous and abusive in tone than Mackworth’s acknowledged writings, none the less developed arguments he had used before, and towards the end went out of its way to include a lengthy recapitulation of the Aylesbury case. However, there was no corroborative evidence, and the inquiries of Secretary Harley and the Privy Council came to nothing. Cowper felt that Harley was covering up for a fellow Tory. This may have been true, despite the fact that Harley had been the intended victim of Mackworth’s intrigue in 1704 and that Harley’s close friend, Thomas Mansel I*, was Mackworth’s bitter enemy. On the other side, it must be said that Harley did continue to pursue his inquiries for a further year or so, when all but he had abandoned the chase. ‘The spite and malice of wicked, designing courtiers’, which Thomas Hearne detected behind the information against Mackworth, may well have emanated from Harley’s circle. In the following sessions Mackworth was both less prominent and less active, as the difficulties of the Mine Adventurers’ Company monopolized his energies. It was reported early in December 1706 that Mackworth had ‘deserted the Tories and is come over to the Whigs’. On 10 Dec. he reintroduced his poor relief bill, for the last time. Mackworth subsequently chaired the committee of the whole upon this measure and on 13 Feb. 1707 carried the bill to the Lords, where it again failed. During the 1707–8 session he reported from three committees: two on petitions from Exeter (Seymour’s constituency), against woollen imports from Austria and yarn imports from Ireland (23 Dec., 18 Feb. 1708); and one to receive proposals for covering the cupola of St. Paul’s Cathedral (23 Feb.). In lists from early 1708 he was still classified as a Tory.11

Mackworth’s preoccupations were now local and financial rather than high-political. He had become embroiled in a bitter and occasionally violent dispute with his Glamorgan neighbours the Mansels, an economic war that turned into a political one. Thomas Mansel II’s* collieries at Briton Ferry were in direct competition with Mackworth’s, and it would appear that it was from this rivalry that enmity had sprung. Ostensibly the two factions had been on good terms as late as July 1700, when the Mine Adventurers’ Company voted thanks to Thomas Mansel II for several favours to them, but Mackworth’s diary hints at ill-feeling as early as 1695, and certainly by 1703 he had found cause for complaint. His troubles then included ‘the mutiny and desertion of the colliers, the falling-in of the coal works, and at last . . . Mr Mansel’s diversion of the trade to Swansea’. Allegedly, agents from Briton Ferry had been sent to Bridgwater to disparage the quality of the coal exported from Neath. Mansel had exploited the disaffection of many Neath burgesses who resented Mackworth’s use of his own wharves and increasing retention of the coal from his pits to fire his smelting-works, thus depriving them of valuable revenue. They also bridled at the extension of Mackworth’s political influence, especially after 1703, when he had been appointed constable of Neath Castle under the Jeffreys family. Mackworth regarded their recalcitrance as downright ingratitude, claiming with no little justification that he had single-handedly rescued the town from economic depression and had made it ‘one of the best towns of trade in south Wales’. There was an altercation in 1704, when the corporation sought to impose duties on company goods, and were resisted. Things came to a head early in 1705, with the building of Mackworth’s ‘wagon-way’. There were mob attacks on the ‘wagon-way’; sorties from Neath burgesses including Mansel, in order to exercise a pretended right to cheap coal from Mackworth’s stores, provoking charges of trespass and criminal damage; and finally the impressment of several of Mackworth’s workmen, all of which drew the two parties into open conflict. In seeking redress at law over both the impressment and the destruction of his ‘wagon-way’, Mackworth ran up against the power of the Mansel connexion, especially that of the Mansels of Margam. Sir Edward Mansel, 4th Bt.†, and his son Thomas Mansel I, cousins of the Mansels of Briton Ferry, constituted the dominant power in Glamorgan politics and in local government, and Mackworth found it impossible to secure judgments in his favour within the county. With the financial backing of the company he took his cases first to Queen’s bench and then in December 1705 to the House of Commons where in two complaints he alleged breach of privilege against those who had trespassed on his property, broken down his ‘wagon-way’ and impressed his servants. His opponents countered with a complaint against him from an official of the company, who alleged that Mackworth had refused to settle his arrears of salary until assurances were given that the employee would ‘not be concerned’ as a witness in Mackworth’s case against the Glamorgan j.p.s. On 31 Jan. the House first voted to reject this new petition, and then heard the case of Mackworth’s impressed servant, William Blower, voting the proceedings against him to be illegal. In an adjournment division during the debate, two High Tories appeared as tellers for Mackworth and two Whigs as tellers on the other side. Despite his apparent vindication, Mackworth had not yet defeated the Mansels. Mackworth’s prime adversary was now Thomas Mansel I, who in 1706 succeeded first his father at Margam and then his cousin at Briton Ferry. The Case of Sir Humphrey Mackworth . . . with Respect to the Extraordinary Proceedings of the Agents, Servants and Dependants of . . . Sir Thomas Mansel, the near-paranoid defence of his conduct which Mackworth published in 1707, accused his enemies of continuing to organize violence and rig local courts against his mines and miners. Distraints by constables, juggling of land tax assessments, refusal to execute judgments of higher courts, and the packing of grand juries, were presented as common practice, and Mackworth went so far as to allege that there had been attempts on his life: an intended ambush ‘upon the sands between Briton Ferry and Aberavon’, and a challenge from one of Mansel’s servants, William Phillips, which Mackworth (partly because duelling contravened the principles upheld by the SPCK, and partly from suspicion of a conspiracy) had refused. Indeed, he took the latter affair before the Commons in November 1707, in another complaint of breach of privilege, and obliged Phillips to beg pardon of the House for issuing the challenge. From the opposite viewpoint, Mansel’s supporters regarded Mackworth as ‘the cause of all the mischief in that county’ and as a would-be ‘tyrant’, seeking to establish a political hegemony over Glamorgan. The conflict had begun to take on a political dimension through Mackworth’s struggles with the burgesses of Neath, which during 1705 had escalated from differences over customs duties and mining rights to a full-scale battle for control of the corporation. Mackworth was eventually obliged to resort to a quo warranto to bring the burgesses to heel. He had won the battle by 1707, when his lease of coal mines from the corporation was confirmed, and further town lands were assigned to him, and after a purge of the burgess lists he could be sure of commanding the bulk of the Neath interest in the Cardiff Boroughs constituency, which previously had been at the disposal of the Mansels. He was also making ground in two other out-boroughs, Aberavon, the scene of another conflict with a pro-Mansel faction, in which he again held the important office of constable of the castle, and Loughor, where for some time he had been busy purchasing land. These purchases, together with the refurbishment of his house in Neath, and the sudden expansion of his political as well as economic influence, made him appear Mansel’s main rival in Glamorgan politics. In fact, in the years 1705–8, he was but one member of an anti-Mansel coalition, in county and boroughs, headed by Lord Windsor (Thomas*) and the Duke of Beaufort, a coalition which seriously threatened the Mansel ascendancy but which collapsed in 1708 with a reconciliation between Beaufort and Mansel. Mackworth does not seem ever to have been put forward as a parliamentary candidate by this group, and he did not possess sufficient independent interest to stand on his own, even after 1708 when he was buying more land from Lord Windsor. In addition there was some tension between Mackworth and Beaufort, the product of a rivalry that was political and economic: political, in that Loughor, one of Mackworth’s electoral hunting-grounds, was traditionally a Beaufort borough; economic in so far as the collieries in the Beaufort estate in west Glamorgan, under the management of a more efficient local agent than hitherto, represented at least potential competition.12

In making such a profound enemy of Thomas Mansel, Mackworth had given a valuable hostage to fortune. While the ‘Harleyites’, including Mansel, remained in office Mackworth could count on the support of disgruntled High Tories and Whigs on bringing his local grievances to Westminster. The rapprochement of 1708, nationally and locally, whereby Mansel and his friends became reconciled to the rest of the Tory party, left him exposed, and at precisely the time that his business activities were coming under unwelcome public scrutiny. He lost the protection of a parliamentary seat in the 1708 general election. The death of Seymour undermined Mackworth’s chances of re-election at Totnes, where he was eventually defeated following a poll, and, unable to stand for Glamorgan and Cardiff Boroughs owing to the understanding between Beaufort and the Mansels, he turned back to Cardiganshire. Intrigues to upset the governing Tory interest of Lewis Pryse failed, and he settled for an agreement whereby he was to stand aside for Pryse’s nominee in the Boroughs constituency, in return for a guarantee of Pryse’s backing the next time. Implausibly, he ‘expressed an indifferency whether I came into Parliament this session or not’. In the event, Pryse stood in both constituencies, to protect himself against Whig opposition, and waited until he had survived a petition for the county before making his choice to sit as knight of the shire. By October 1709 Mackworth, expecting a decision on the petition in the ensuing session, was canvassing energetically, promising the voters to ‘bring the white cloth trade from Shrewsbury into Cardiganshire’ and to build a new quay at Aberystwyth. Horrified to find himself put on the list for sheriffs, he applied to the Duke of Marlborough, presenting himself as the victim of a plot hatched by Mansel, Robert Harley and Sir Simon Harcourt, and declaring of himself that ‘no person can be better affected to her Majesty’s government or can have a greater honour and service for your grace on all occasions’. The reason for this change of tack was that Pryse now proposed not to have him chosen for the vacant seat, which was to be used instead as a bolt-hole for Harcourt. Mackworth’s account, sent to Marlborough in the following January when the by-election was imminent, claimed that Pryse

came lately to desire that notwithstanding the late agreement . . . I would acquiesce for this time, having his interest in all future Parliaments, to which I was not averse, if he made choice of a good man. But when he named Sir Simon Harcourt, and upon the solicitation of Mr Harley and his friends, of which Sir Tho[mas] Mansel was one, I told him they were persons I had no good opinion of, and could not consent.

Instead, he declared his intention to fight, and to this end approached two prominent Cardiganshire Whigs, who were prepared to back him if he could satisfy them ‘that I am not unacceptable to your grace and my Lord Treasurer’. His anxiety was quickly explained. During his absence at the poll a petition was presented to the House from creditors of, and proprietors of stock in, the Mine Adventurers’ Company, alleging mismanagement and fraud, and pressing for a reorganization of the company’s affairs. Returning from a defeat at the Cardigan Boroughs by-election of February 1710, for which he blamed the partisanship of the returning officer, Mackworth found that not only had this petition been received and committed, but the committee had completed their hearings. He applied to the House to be heard by counsel before the report was made, but by the time he was allowed to be heard a report had been made and a bill to relieve the petitioners had been ordered. However, his hearing, which lasted from 22 to 31 Mar., caused the relief bill to lapse. It was replaced by a second bill, ordered on 31 Mar. and engrossed on 5 Apr., to prevent Mackworth and two subordinates from leaving the country or alienating their estates before the end of the next parliamentary session. This was lost in the Upper House. The revelations of the hearings finally blasted Mackworth’s reputation, at least as far as the Commons were concerned. Some damage had already been incurred, as a result of an inquiry within the company and a public squabble, carried on through the medium of the press, between Mackworth and his detractors, principally his former agent William Waller, on whom he was anxious to pin all blame. Waller’s ‘vindications’, which disclosed private correspondence from Mackworth, depicted Sir Humphrey as ruthless, devious, hypocritical, self-seeking and corrupt. Harcourt, discounting any threat from Mackworth’s election petition, remarked dismissively, ‘though a High Churchman, his honesty in his mine adventure will hardly maintain his character’, and the election petition was rapidly dropped. Excuses could be advanced for the failure of the Mine Adventurers: technical difficulties in mining production; the obstructionism of local opponents; Mackworth’s own inexperience and, to a degree, Waller’s incompetence; and, above all, a chronic shortage of capital which the company tried and failed to remedy in 1707–8 by an excursion into banking that lasted only until the Bank of England secured legislative confirmation of its monopoly. But the detail of the Commons’ inquiries fully substantiated Waller’s allegations of malpractice and fraud against Mackworth himself, who was shown to have frequently infringed the terms of the company’s charter, forged names to subscriptions, diverted company funds and the energies of company staff to his own private affairs, and obtained loans which were neither accounted for nor repaid. His defence concentrated on the iniquities and ineptitude of some of the company’s servants and on the unhappy combination of circumstances which had deprived the company of funds at a crucial time. As for himself, he claimed to have lost everything in the debacle. Repeatedly he protested that he had spent large sums from his own purse on behalf of the company, and was ‘so great a sufferer by these misfortunes to his mines, that he has been necessitated to borrow money of divers friends . . . amounting to several thousand pounds’. More specifically, he claimed that from an annual income of £2,200 he had saved on average £1,500, which he had lent to the company, amounting to nearly £15,000 in all. This, he said, had seriously jeopardized the inheritance of his eldest son and had prevented him making any provision for his younger children. The real state of his finances, however, remains unclear. Waller noted sourly that he was

a gentleman who at the beginning of the undertaking owed for his new purchased chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, and owned he had not paid for an estate he had bought at Cardiff . . . but by his wonderful management of affairs since, has bought no less than nine lordships in the same county, and has found money either of his own, or somebody else, to pay for them all.

Certainly he continued to purchase property, in Glamorgan and elsewhere, and his later ventures into industry and finance were partly funded from his own pocket. It would not be safe to believe his own testimony, in a letter to his brother in about 1713, which claimed a yearly deficit rather than profit on his estate, debts of over £3,000 as a result of his ‘defence in Parliament’, and even substantial ‘debt[s] to tradesmen’: ‘no man except Job had ever more afflictions at one time to cast him down from a state of prosperity to so great a plague of trouble and misery’. The one solid fact to be ascertained is the growing mortgage debt which he began to incur at the time of the company’s collapse, and which kept him afloat subsequently. But however well he had covered his tracks in terms of his personal finances, his conduct of company business had been amply demonstrated to the Commons, which voted him guilty ‘of many notorious and scandalous frauds, and indirect practices, in violation of the charter granted to the said company, in breach of his trust, and to the manifest wrong and oppression of the proprietors and creditors’. His old antagonist Defoe, who had attacked the company as early as 1706, was cock-a-hoop:

Such a fraud has not been practised for some ages in any nation circumstanced with so many unmerciful particulars, wheedling in widows and orphans, and all kinds of unwary people – covering the cheats of management with all the cunning of a 20 years’ artifice – lotteries, insurances, funds, loans, interests, ingraftments, banks, and a hundred more shams above ground, besides all their subterranean frauds . . . then, to whiten this devil, it has been defended by pious shams, pretences of religion, writing books of meditations, and the like . . . full four years ago I . . . told you all, it was an original cheat, and that it could never stand; and that . . . all this lead would turn to dross.13

In order to secure his return to Parliament at the general election of 1710, Mackworth, who had suffered the indignity of removal from the Glamorgan commission of the peace, presumably through Mansel’s spite, was forced to close with the Cardiganshire Whigs. Their assistance he obtained partly by interceding again with Marlborough over items of military patronage, and partly by his willingness to oppose the Pryse interest. Having bought off the other major Tory power in the county, Thomas Powell of Nanteos, he defeated Lewis Pryse at the polls. Even so, he was still listed with the ‘Tory patriots’ who voted for peace in April 1711, and the ‘worthy patriots’ who in the first session of the new Parliament exposed the mismanagements of the old ministry. His main concern now, however, was his rearguard action to retain a stake in, and then to regain control of, the Mine Adventurers’ Company. During the summer of 1710 the company’s creditors had concluded agreements among themselves and with the company to form a ‘united society’ and in January 1711 they petitioned the House to oblige Mackworth to come to terms with them. The end result was an Act to restructure the company, which barred Mackworth and his confederates from holding directorships. As far as Mackworth was concerned, this outcome was ‘to my satisfaction’. He had at least, by dint of a barrage of printed vindications, prevented his own estate from being sequestered or in any way secured to guarantee payment of the company’s debts, and he claimed to have foiled an unnamed enemy’s attempts against him. There had been one embarrassment, when the Commons condemned on 19 May 1711 the Observations on the Bill Relating to the Mine Adventurers, which he had been responsible for circulating, if not for the actual composition. Excusing himself on the grounds that he had received the papers ‘in a hurry’ and was unaware of the ‘expressions’ they contained, he acknowledged his error and the affair dropped. His one tellership in this Parliament, on 24 Apr. 1712, in favour of laying a duty on imports of wrought brass, arose directly from his latest industrial activities at Neath and Melincrythan where he had set up a new joint-stock company of ‘Mineral Manufacturers’ in order to produce brass and copper. In 1713 he described himself as ‘surrounded with Germans and other artists and preparing divers mills, ponds, dams and all sorts of iron engines for the works’. As ever, most of the money had been supplied by an outside investor, with Mackworth keeping control of operations. His papers reveal, however, that this was in reality an elaborate ploy to force the Mine Adventurers’ Company to make peace: ‘I am sure it is the interest of the other companies to give me £10,000 rather than I should proceed.’ The company did not view matters in the same light, so he was obliged to avail himself of direct action, and in 1720, with the Mine Adventurers’ directors seeking to exploit a financial boom to attract new capital, he was able to stage a coup at the company’s court, which he packed with supporters to ensure his own election as governor and the accompanying election of relations and friends to the board. He was now long out of Parliament, and had lost touch with public affairs, and within a year or so his opponents had gone to law to drive him out. Still he did not give up, and undertook legal action against the company’s local managers, who, true to form, he saw as engaged in a ‘conspiracy against him’. On the basis that he retained some £1,000 stock in the company and owned the freehold of the ‘workhouses’, he pressed for the right to appoint and dismiss the managers, in a campaign that he appears still to have been waging at his death.14

Far from witnessing a recessional, the last decade of Mackworth’s life was one of unremitting activity. Besides his industrial and commercial enterprises, which also included developing interests in Cornish mining and projecting a scheme for a fishery, he wrote several more pamphlets. Reasons for Suppressing the Mughouses . . ., an attack on Whig political clubs in London in 1717, probably came from his pen. While more stridently anti-Nonconformist, and even anti-Hanoverian, than his other writings, it touches upon some themes with which he had been engaged. He noted, for instance, that the mughouses ‘promoted idleness and debauchery, and therefore ought to be discountenanced by the civil magistrate’. Then in 1720 he contributed at least one and perhaps two ‘proposals’ for the payment of the ‘public debts’, the second (and the more definite attribution) being directed towards the relief of the South Sea Company, in which he had from the first been an enthusiastic investor. As befitted the founder of two joint-stock companies, the second inflating a ‘Welsh Copper Bubble’ in the 1720s, his writings on this topic demonstrated his deep faith in a ‘fund of credit’. Much of his energy was devoted to litigation, not only against the Mine Adventurers’ Company, but against neighbours and local rivals (including the Mansels) over property rights, causes he pursued as vigorously as permitted by failing health, which in 1723 confined him to travel in a ‘horse litter’. He even spent some time in the custody of the Chancery serjeant for failing to settle his accounts. Such were his ‘sufferings’ in these years that he compared himself to Naboth, ‘who lost his life for his vineyard’, and even to Christ: ‘I suffer no more than the greatest man in the world did before me, when in affliction every one of his friends forsook him and fled.’ Apart from an intimate circle of servants and agents, however, most contemporaries seem to have preferred his more humble description of himself as ‘one of the vilest sinners’ who had been guilty of ‘great failings and fouls in the sight of an Almighty eye’. His brother Bulkeley finally broke with him over his treatment of one of his own sons: Sir Humphrey, he wrote, ‘has made his name stink in Shropshire, by taking the very bread out of his children’s mouths, and throwing it to the dogs’. Politically, Mackworth was scarcely active after the Hanoverian succession. Leaving aside his probable condemnation of the mughouses in 1717, which included several innuendoes against the new royal court, he does not appear to have shared the Jacobite sympathies once expressed by his cousin Sir Thomas, and almost his last act was to organize a loyal address on the accession of George II.15

Mackworth died, ‘of a fever’, on 25 Aug. 1727, at the Gnoll, and was buried at Neath. A final statement of his accounts credits him with assets of around £14,450 (including the value of his estate) but with debts of over £17,000, many of them mortgages taken out since 1709. His eldest son, Herbert, represented Cardiff Boroughs, 1739–65; his youngest, William, who became the adopted heir of John Praed* and took his name, sat for Praed’s borough of St. Ives, 1734–41.16

Ref Volumes: 1690-1715

Author: D. W. Hayton

Notes

Unless otherwise stated, this biography is based on the DNB and on Mary Ransome, ‘Parlty. Career of Sir Humphrey Mackworth’, Birmingham Univ. Hist. Jnl. i. 232-47.